Safety and passwords

One of my friends is working in a Bank and is using software called Finacle owned by Infosys Technologies. One day he came to the Bank and after one hour had to leave on some emergency. Finacle logs off the user if he is inactive for a 180 seconds period. With this in mind, he did not log out of the system when he went away.

Then next day he learned that lots of transactions had taken place in his log in while he was away.

Currently all passwords are punched in when you log on to a system and till the next log out, no password prompt is there. The situation discussed above could be avoided if the system prompts for password while a user is logged on. If system asks for password say every five minutes, then unauthorised usage can be reduced to a maximum of five minutes.

If in addition to this an alert is sent to the Data centre on the punching in of wrong password, such instances can be avoided. Those smarter will not punch in the password when prompted while in unauthorised usage and for this also an alert should be sent.

Custom newspapers

Printed newspapers around the world are facing the threat of closure due to dwindling ad revenue and free access to online editions to readers.

Publishing needs out of the box thinking to survive these tough times.

Currently newspapers publish different editions from different places with some changes in content. A better way would be to have separate editions of the same newspaper for different age groups.

Thus you can have a Times of India youth edition and another one for a higher age group. Advertisers are likely to respond positively as they can target the ads with more focus.

Currently one can subscribe only fully to a newspaper. Instead of that imagine you can buy only those pages that you want!

If you are a trader in stocks and you want only the stock quotes and company specific news, why buy the whole newspaper with all the editorial and general news and all?

Newspaper vending machines are in vogue in many parts of the world and with the present technology it is not difficult to have a vending machine which displays the pages of the day's newspaper on a screen. Pages skip past one by one and you can have a glance at the pages and not read them. After having a full view, you can punch in the pages you want and pay for only those. The pages you selected is then printed out to you.

Content specific ads are placed in those pages just like in the Net. This can be tried out in developed countries before thinking about complete closure of centuries old newspapers.


An even more aggressive idea will be to place the pages of all the major newspapers on to the vending machine and a reader can select different pages of different newspapers and get an assorted newspaper. For example, consider a family comprising of a husband interested in stocks and sports, his son pursuing civil service exams, daughter mad about the film world and the house wife interested local news. It may be difficult to get the best writing in all these categories from a single newspaper. Thus from the vending machine everyone can be satisfied.

Let us see the impact of this.

Advertising will be more focussed as said above. And what will happen to the newspaper content? Presently how many newspapers know which page and which section of theirs is most read and most ignored?

With this pre printed newspapers will be substituted with live printing of newspapers. Printing will be shifted to the vending machines. Financial aspect of this will require a more detailed study.

This idea may be worth trying out.

a greener fuel subsidy

World over, fuel prices are a sensitive issue and almost in every country trasportation fuel is subsidised. But it has its own problems like sharing the subsidy burden, depletion of a fossil fuel, air pollution, etc.

Revamping the system of subsidies can do a lot to solve most of the problems. The following idea may be worth trying.

Instead of giving subsidy to all consumers, subsidised fuel should be restricted to operators of public transport and carriers of freight. All private vehicles should be charged rates related to the ruling crude oil rates converted to local currencies. Thus those who are using private vehicles will have to pay more or they may choose public transport to have cheaper rates.

The subsidy provided should be such that running the vehicles is more profitable than selling the fuel in the black market. To ensure this all vehicles may be charged the same price and those eligible reimbursed the subsidy subsequently based on distance travelled. The distance should be calculated scientifically based on parameters like route plied by the vehicle, fuel used, frequency of journey, etc.

Such a system will ensure lesser subsidy burden for oil companies, more efficient and cheaper public transport and lower inflation rates due to reduced freight rates. Moreover as more people use public transport, air pollution and traffic congestion will reduce considerably. Oil is a non renewable energy resource getting depleted fast and unless we consume it more responsibly, diesel and petrol vehicles will be soon off the roads.

Re writing rules of Cricket

Cricket is a game of glorious uncertainities and has always been a first to innovate and improvise. The greatest proof of this is additions to versions of cricket right from one day matches, day night cricket and to the latest blockbuster, 20/20.

Any innovation which makes it even more uncertain is always welcome.

May I suggest a couple of ideas.

What about removing overs per bowler restriction in one day and 20/20 matches? Its effect will be two pronged. Teams can accomodate more batsmen and you can have the likes Muralitharan or Brett Lee going for the throat of batsmen in full swing for 20 or more overs in a match.

Another idea is to compensate the bowling team according to the mode of dismissal of the batsmen. The most convincing modes of dismissal of batsmen are bowled, leg before wicket and caught by wicket keeper/slip fielders. So for each such dismissal, bowling teams can be given bonus runs. And dismissal of top order batsmen can be given more weightage to avoid over compensating bowlers for wickets in the slog overs of tail enders. This can be experimented for test matches also. Thus you can have the team batting second start with a score more than zero. Also imagine a batsman is dismissed clean bowled in the last innings of the match; automatically the target increases by the bonus runs the bowling team earns. So an idea worth trying.

These changes can help make the game more uncertain, more bowler friendly and above all more exciting to watch.

Power corrupts.
The moment so called communists and socialists get to power, their whole colour changes.
They are the ones deeper in corruption when in power compared to free market advocates and capitalists.

But there are a lot of organisations like Greenpeace which are crusaders for their ideology.

So how to get the ideology work through without corruption ?
Presently all democratic legislatures have ruling party and opposition party. To this I am adding one more, ie. independents.

These are parties like Greenpeace etc. who declare upfront that they will neither form a Government nor will they support them. But they contest the election and if they succeed what do they do?

They vote on all bills presented purely based on its merits and compatibilty with their ideology.
Thus we have a 20/30/40 man Greenpeace team in Parliaments voting for and against conservation and destruction.

This is just a thread which needs a lot of fine tuning to make it work.

To the list of Greenpeace we may add Art of Living foundation, Maoist revolutionaries, Marxists, Trade Unionists, etc. So imagine the change it can bring about.

Nowadays voters have to choose between devil or deep sea and nothing good. So this can be a real move forward.

A lot of paper is wasted in a lot of places as only one side is printed.

One way to avoid this is to keep all one side printed papers upside down and keep it with a dedicated printer.

All those printouts which are not to be filed and used for later should be printed to this printer.

A common sight at traffic lights are screaming ambulances struggling among a multitude of vehicles.

Why not have clearly demarcated tracks at all traffic lights through which an ambulance can move forward in case that path is stopped for traffic with red light?

This means in a four way junction, a certain space is marked as track on each of the four roads and just as an ambulance arrives those vehicles on that track move over to some other space(which also may be shown with arrows) clearing the way for the ambulance